the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Dec 1, 2008
More than ten million people out of work in October, 6.5% of the active work force–that is the official word from the U.S. Department of Labor.
Bad enough–but ten million is only a small part of the story. When the government compiles unemployment statistics, it excludes a great many people from its monthly announcement–but it keeps figures on them anyway. When it adds them back, it gets a grand total of 22.6 million people who were either unemployed or working many fewer hours than the full time job they want.
This comes to more than one out of every seven workers deprived of work, fully or partly, in October. Appalling!
It certainly didn’t get any better in November, as announcement followed announcement: 54,000 jobs to be cut at CitiGroup; 24,000 at Hewlett-Packard; 6,000 at Sun Microsystems; 5,000 white collar workers at Chrysler; 2,500 at ArcelorMittal Steel, and nearly as many at U.S. Steel and AK Steel; 3,000 at Yahoo; several thousands at the many semiconductor-equipment companies; hundreds of thousands put at risk in auto.
And it won’t get better over the next period. Economic forecasters at the University of Michigan predict–in what they call an "optimistic forecast"–that another 2.4 million people will lose jobs during the next 18 months.
We are in the midst of what economists call a "feedback loop"" that is, the vicious job cutting circle. Construction workers, laid off because of the impact of the mortgage crisis, stopped buying cars and refrigerators and furniture. That led to layoffs for auto workers and appliance workers and furniture workers, along with workers in all those industries producing their raw materials–steel, plastics, glass, rubber, chemicals, fabrics. And all those laid-off workers stopped buying anything but the bare necessities, which spreads layoffs to other industries, including to office workers who handle records for all this production. And all these layoffs mean fewer taxes paid to cities and states, which are right now announcing layoffs for municipal and state workers–who can’t buy houses or cars or appliances.... looping back to bring still more layoffs.
It’s not by their own choice that 22.6 million people found themselves either unemployed or underemployed. Job cuts are capitalism’s choice–capitalism’s response to a falling rate of profit–even when this choice leads to disaster for the whole society.
Friendly politicians are filled with advice to workers caught up in capitalism’s deadly spiral: "Be patient," they say, "things will get better–but only after they get worse!"
Well, workers have seen enough of "worse"–why wait for more of it?
Put a moratorium on layoffs!
Put a moratorium on job cuts!
The Democrats and Republicans rushed to hand over trillions of dollars to the wealthy class that caused the crisis.
A political party, ready to defend the interests of the vast majority of the population, would rush even faster to forbid all job cuts, to forbid all layoffs. It would require that every bank–and every company funded by those banks–put people back to work before they got a cent from the government.
Put a moratorium on job cuts and layoffs " anything less means catastrophe for working people.
Dec 1, 2008
So far, the U.S. Treasury Department has burned through hundreds of billions of dollars bailing out banks and insurance companies. What happened to all the money? About a third has gone into dividends the banks are paying their shareholders. Some of the rest into executive salaries and bonuses. Another portion has been used by banks to buy each other up. More than 200 billion dollars was swallowed up by giant insurer, AIG.
While more and more people face a depression and economic catastrophe, our taxpayer money could have been used to create jobs, expand the safety net and social programs like education and health care.
Instead it is going to the same billionaires who caused the crisis.
Dec 1, 2008
Winter blew into Baltimore Monday November 17. Sure enough that night, two main water main breaks erupted. Traffic had to be re-routed during rush-hour morning traffic. What a mess!
It can be predicted this winter that water main breaks will pop up all over the city. WHY? Cold temperatures cause aging infrastructure to rear its ugly head.
SOLUTION? Hire more city workers to repair and replace pipes. They"d have a paycheck to buy essentials. It would improve the economy. And there"d be fewer traffic hassles.
Makes sense all around.
Dec 1, 2008
In Montebello, near Los Angeles, nearly 5,000 people showed up at a food bank on the Saturday before Thanksgiving. Organizers were surprised by the turnout, which was more than twice the number they had expected.
In the Los Angeles area, demand for food aid from local food banks has increased by more than 40% since last year, according to the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank. The trend certainly is repeated elsewhere in the country–with a surge of 33% in Chicago, and 25% in Dallas, two other cities where such statistics were available. Thirty-six million Americans, nearly one in eight, go to bed hungry, uncertain about their next meal, according to Feed America.
Many of the people waiting in line in Montebello were “people who just lost their job, are trying to pay their mortgage, or tapping into their 401(k),” said a food bank spokesman.
Not a surprise, for sure. Across the country, companies are laying off tens of thousands of workers. They are reducing hours, pay and pension benefits. As adjustable rates on mortgages kick in, homeowners are losing their homes. Working families are being forced to choose between mortgage payments and food.
Hunger–another product of a capitalist system that long ago wore out its welcome.
Dec 1, 2008
As the financial system and economy collapses, the federal government has pledged 7.2 trillion dollars to financial companies and banks in loans, investments and guarantees. This mind-boggling sum of taxpayer money represents more than double the entire federal budget, including Social Security, and almost half the entire U.S. economy.
Just as stupefying are the links between the few people who have been making the decisions about this taxpayer money. The recent massive bailout of Citigroup was worked out by three people: Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Timothy Geithner, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York ... and Robert Rubin, who today sits on the board of that same Citigroup which got the money. The three of them made the decisions to inject 20 billion dollars of taxpayer money directly into Citigroup’s coffers, and to issue a U.S. government guarantee for 300 billion dollars of Citigroup’s bad debt.
“This is a small, close-knit world,” commented a professor from Georgetown University. That’s for sure! All three have longstanding ties in business and government. Both Paulson and Rubin had worked together at the same Wall Street investment bank, Goldman Sachs, and they both headed Goldman Sachs before they were appointed to head the U.S. Treasury (Rubin by Bill Clinton and Paulson by George W. Bush). Geithner worked for Rubin when Rubin was U.S. Treasury Secretary. And, as head of the New York Federal Reserve, Geithner brought over several high officials from the same company, Goldman Sachs, to fill important positions at the Fed.
These ties extend into the bowels of the government and Federal Reserve system. For example, Josh Bolten, Bush’s chief of staff, who chose Paulson to head the Treasury Department, used to work at Goldman Sachs. Paulson, in turn, staffed the Treasury Department with underlings from Goldman Sachs, starting with Neel Kashkari, who is in charge of administering the bailouts.
Decisions these people made when in the government benefitted Goldman Sachs. No surprise! In October, the federal government allowed one of Goldman Sachs’s main competitors, Lehman Brothers, to fail without a government bailout. Two days later, the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve stepped in to prop up and take over AIG, the insurance giant that was in the process of collapsing under a mountain of bad debt. AIG also happens to be the main trading partner with Goldman Sachs, and Goldman Sachs stood to lose tens of billions of dollars if AIG had gone broke. Paulson then appointed a former Goldman Sachs official to run AIG.
Some writers for the New York Times and Washington Post have suggested this is a conspiracy. No–it’s just the way the government is run. After all, Goldman Sachs is by far the biggest investment bank in the country with connections throughout the economy. Its size and influence in the financial world allows it to play a dominant role in the government.
The bigger and more dominant companies with the most government connections take advantage of the financial crisis to drive their competitors out of business, while buttressing their own position–with the backing of the full force and resources of the government.
Don’t expect this to change under the Obama administration. Goldman Sachs contributed more money to the Obama campaign than did any other company, $874,207, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Obama’s new head of the Treasury Department will be the same Timothy Geithner, who has been so central to the bailout of Wall Street, and who had all those close ties to Goldman Sachs through Rubin and Paulson.
Dec 1, 2008
Barack Obama campaigned against the “politics of the past,” but his appointments show that he plans to make the future look a lot like the past.
One after another, he has appointed people who have been right in the thick of creating the messes we confront.
To deal with the economy, Obama chose people like:
Lawrence Summers as White House National Economics Council director. In 2007, Summers said, “No one can be other than appalled by the failures of risk management that have led to this enormous disruption in the nation’s financial markets and in the lives of a fairly large number of families.” He ought to know–he instituted some of those “failures of risk management” when he removed financial controls as one of Clinton’s Treasury Secretaries!
Timothy Geithner as Treasury Secretary. Geithner, who was also in the Clinton White House, has spent the past five years in the Federal Reserve during the Bush administration. Geithner was one of the main architects of the recent bailouts, along with Bush’s Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson–so we know what he’ll plan to do.
And, Peter Orszag, as White House Budget Director. He too worked in the Clinton White House. As recently as September, he said, “The most likely scenario appears to be one in which economic growth continues.” Nice call!
The head of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors says that Obama has put together an impressive team. That ought to tell us something!
To address foreign policy, that is, effectively two wars, Obama is appointing:
Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State! When he ran for president against her, Obama criticized her willingness to send the U.S. to war. Now he’s appointing her to carry out that policy!
And, Obama is planning to keep as his Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who currently holds that position under George W. Bush. Gates has been credited with the “success” of the “surge.” The surge has only succeeded in destroying the country of Iraq, and in creating a much larger antagonism toward the U.S. in that region and around the world. Now Obama is attaching himself to that plan.
This is not what people expected when they voted for a candidate promising change!
Obama explains these choices by saying that in this time of crisis, we need experience, continuity and stability in the White House.
In other words–No change! More of the same!
The candidate of “change” has appointed longstanding functionaries from BOTH parties who for the past sixteen years have carried out the same foreign and economic policies that have attacked working people everywhere. This shouldn’t surprise us: no matter who the front man is–Bush or Obama–these people run the bourgeois state–for the bourgeoisie.
And that class WANTS stability and continuity–more of the same.
Dec 1, 2008
Afghanistan is the war that we are told is the "right war"–but it is just as wrong as the one in Iraq. The people of Afghanistan did not attack the World Trade Center on 9/11–yet the people of Afghanistan are the ones who are suffering and dying under the U.S. attack.
Over the last three years, the U.S. has carried out a vicious bombing campaign. In 2006, there were 10 times more air strikes and bombings than the previous year. In 2007, the number of air strikes almost doubled again. At the same time, U.S. and NATO forces also stepped up large-scale house-to-house searches and raids.
In the last 15 months, more civilians have been killed than in the previous four years combined. At the same time, the U.S."s hand-picked president, Hamid Karzai, has built a government made up of reactionary tribal chiefs who have divided up the country into their own private fiefdoms.
The U.S. and the Karzai government have managed to make Afghanistan, already one of the poorest countries on the planet before the war, even poorer. Afghanistan is now ranked by the U.N. as fifth from the bottom, in terms of development, in the world. At least half the economy is once again based on the production of opium, supplying more than 90% of the opium for heroin in the world. Warlords in the Karzai regime, as well as Karzai’s own brother, profit from the trafficking in drugs. U.S. drug eradication efforts are merely the cover for carrying out a war against the insurgency, with the population suffering the brunt of the attacks. The other main economic engine is the trade in arms, given the enormous military presence inside the country.
Kabul itself lies in tatters. There is electricity and running water at the center of the city where the government resides, along with the offices of U.S. and international military authorities, the U.N. and various aid organizations and housing and shopping for their staffs. But poor Afghans live in crumbling hovels with no electricity and often without safe drinking water. Kabul, a city built for 800,000 people, now holds more than four million, most squeezed into informal settlements and squatters’ shacks. There are massive craters from decades of war.
Living conditions are deplorable. Most estimate unemployment as high as 80% in some parts of the country. More than 42% of the Afghan population lives in extreme poverty and the average Afghan family earns about 10 dollars per month. Given the skyrocketing food and fuel prices over the last year, it means that half of the population is not able to purchase enough food to guarantee bare minimum health levels, according to the Brookings Institute. Reports are emerging of parents selling their children simply to make ends meet. In one district of a southern province last spring, things got so bad, villagers started eating grass. Oxfam has warned that this winter, hunger may kill up to 80% of the population in some northern provinces caught in a vicious drought.
The situation of women is especially dire. After Sierra Leone, Afghanistan has the highest maternal mortality rate in the world with at least 1,600 deaths per 100,000 live births. Thus, a staggering 24,000 women die every year–60 pregnant women every day.
Karzai’s government, just like the Taliban in its areas, imposes sharia, that is, reactionary fundamentalist religious law, which has a horrific impact on women. In fact, Karzai’s Supreme Court is a direct inheritance of the Taliban.
This is the right war? No way. This is an imperialist war–every bit as abominable as the U.S. wars on Viet Nam or Iraq.
Dec 1, 2008
The U.S. war, repression and absolutely barbaric economic and social conditions are what pushed more of the Afghan population toward the Taliban, broadening its support in the country.
Certainly, the Taliban represents reactionary, tribal policies for the population, and it would undoubtedly impose the same kind of despotic regime as it did before. But the enemy the population confronts right now is the U.S.–which is destroying the country while imposing its own dictatorship, along with the corrupt and venal Karzai government. Conditions are now worse than under the Taliban, and with the same reactionary Sharia law carried out in much of the country.
The Taliban’s reactionary social politics are certainly not the reason for this U.S. war. Nor are they the reason the U.S. is bombing the population! No–control over the region is why the U.S. has carried out a vicious war in Afghanistan now for more than seven years.
The hypocrisy of U.S. claims to be bringing liberation to the Afghan people is demonstrated by recent proposals: the U.S. is ready to cut a deal with “some elements” of the Taliban itself, that is, many of the warlords who went over to the Taliban. The Karzai government is already in negotiations with those warlords. The U.S. is not opposed to brutal reactionaries–so long as they’re the U.S.’s brutal reactionaries.
In pursuing the Taliban, the U.S. military has now gone past attacking the Afghan population into attacking the population in the tribal regions of neighboring Pakistan. Its attacks in the Pakistani tribal region began from the air by helicopters, missiles, jets and drones. By this summer, U.S. commando units were going into Pakistan to carry out raids and assassinations. In July, the Bush administration confirmed that it had given the formal go-ahead for the U.S. military to go into Pakistan.
Using many of the same methods in Pakistan that it has in Afghanistan, U.S. imperialism will get the same results. By murdering civilians, wreaking wanton destruction in their villages, and forcing hundreds of thousands to become refugees, U.S. incursions into Pakistan only produce greater hatred. Instead of weakening the insurgency, U.S. imperialism is spreading it–first of all, throughout the Pakistani tribal areas on the border of Afghanistan and then into other parts of Pakistan.
Pakistan is already a powder keg. The corrupt, despotic Pakistani regime, which has been one of U.S. imperialism’s main bulwarks of support in Central Asia for at least the last three decades, has become ever more parasitic, imposing worsening poverty and a collapsing economy and infrastructure on the great mass of the poor. The U.S. attacks on the Pakistan border regions risk discrediting Pakistan’s government even further, inflaming other parts of the population, thus increasing the chance of a bigger social explosion and a bigger war in Pakistan, a country of 170 million people.
The U.S. is not at the end of its wars in the Middle East and Central Asia. Just as the U.S. ruling class is engulfing the world in the greatest financial and economic crisis since the Great Depression, it is also feeding a regional war in the Middle East and Central Asia that could generalize.
Dec 1, 2008
The Mission Song is a recent novel by John le Carré, the British writer whose novels have often exposed the inner workings of British and American imperialism and the government agencies that carry out the dirty work. This novel is narrated by Salvo, the son of a Congolese woman and an Irish Catholic missionary in the Congo, who is fluent in several Congolese languages. Employed by British intelligence as a translator, he is sent to a secret conference to interpret the discussions between Congolese war lords and members of a Western business syndicate. In it are mercenaries who have fought in wars in various poor countries, consultants and an accountant expert in hiding taxes and intelligence contractors. Behind them are the leading fixtures of American corporate and political power, including a “Wall Street broker and former presidential aide” and a “vice president of the Grayson-Halliburton Communications Enterprise.” The aim of the syndicate is to use the Congolese warlords to carry out a coup in the Kivu area in eastern Congo in order to forestall an election and to facilitate the syndicate’s access to vast mineral resources.
British intelligence and top politicians are shown as the servants of the multinational companies at the expense of the Congolese people. Though Salvo seems assimilated into the upper crust of British society, when he reveals what’s happening to Congo, he’s quickly thrown into prison and disappears.
A book like this is interesting since it shows what happens behind the scenes. Recently, Congo appeared in the news as a rebel army was about to seize the city of Goma, the capital of Kivu. The media mentioned that five million people died in the area in the last five years, but gave no explanation why. The Mission Song gives a vivid picture of how this results from imperialism’s plunder of this part of Africa.
Dec 1, 2008
All those who today are in the U.S. military service volunteered. Some did so with a mistaken sense of patriotism, especially after 9/11. Others joined up for economic reasons and the hope to get an education once they get out.
But once in the military, most soldiers discovered what a big mistake they had made. They were sent into wars not of their own choosing. And they were treated as cannon fodder, to be used, abused and tossed aside once the military is done with them.
That’s what it means to be a pawn for U.S. imperialism.
Dec 1, 2008
The U.S. troop "surge" in Iraq, engineered under General David Petraeus, has been portrayed as a big "success’ and has been credited by the news media and Republican and Democratic politicians with rescuing U.S. imperialism’s disastrous war in Iraq from becoming another Viet Nam, that is, a humiliating defeat.
In reality, the "surge" was an enormous escalation of the war against the Iraqi people, with U.S. troops supporting vast amounts of ethnic cleansing. In Baghdad, U.S. troops and their Iraqi allies bombed and destroyed entire neighborhoods, killing thousands and forcing hundreds of thousands to flee. Refugees from Baghdad then joined a human flood that today encompasses one-sixth of the Iraqi population, or close to five million people. Baghdad was divided up and segregated by enormous blast walls into Sunni and Shia enclaves, which are patrolled by murderous police, gangs and troops. In other words, Baghdad was bled dry... and then turned into a virtual prison.
Some provincial cities like Ramadi and Falujah were reduced to rubble after years and years of intense bombing. If they are quiet... it’s only the quiet of a cemetery.
The country continues to seethe with violence and ethnic conflicts. Iraq is still so dangerous, almost none of the five million refugees have felt safe enough to return home, despite the truly harsh conditions they have to endure as refugees. Those few who returned were most often confronted by the violent hostility of one gang or another, which left them with only this choice: leave or die. Certainly the mixed neighborhoods and cities, where people of different ethnic origins used to live together and intermarry, appear to be a thing of the past.
In other words, the U.S. has achieved a sort of "peace" by pitting one ethnic or religious group against another in battles and butcheries that still continue.
They call the "surge" a success? By this measure, they would call the Holocaust a success!
Dec 1, 2008
“Trouble the Water” is a documentary about the flooding in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. Directed by Tia Lessen and Carl Deal, much of the film comes from video footage shot during the flooding by Kimberly Roberts, a 24-year old black woman from the city’s Lower Ninth Ward. Roberts, who like many others from the area had no transportation out of the city, used a video camera she had purchased from a street hustler to record what she and her family experienced. The film intersperses video from other news sources to fill out what Roberts wasn’t able to film.
Roberts captures the neighborhood as the storm approaches and those with the means to evacuate pack up. Roberts’ family climb into their attic hoping to escape the flooding. They were eventually saved only because some heroic young men from the area waded through the chest-deep flood waters on foot, risking their own lives, and ferried them to safety. Others weren’t so lucky–the government certainly didn’t get people out.
The film exposes the irony of the Louisiana National Guard being deployed in Iraq at the time of the disaster. One of Roberts’ friends later tells some National Guardsmen he prays they won’t have to go back to Iraq because they shouldn’t be there–“the war is right here.”
When Roberts and a group of people seek shelter at a vacant military base, they are turned away by soldiers guarding the base with M-16s.
Roberts and some of the people who rescued her were eventually able to get their hands on a truck. The film follows them as they drive past the city’s convention center, unable to help the many people who have no way to get out. Roberts and her friends go to Memphis and receive help from people there to get by for awhile. Through one of Roberts’ friends, we see the difficulty people had in obtaining the financial aid the government promised. One of Roberts’ friends had moved prior to the storm and was denied assistance when he couldn’t prove he was a resident of the area.
The film shows the devastation left after the storm, when Roberts and her family returned home to find everything in their neighborhood completely destroyed, the streets filled with debris and covered in deep mud. But it also gives a sense of the solidarity felt by the people of the area who pulled together to get through it all.
“Trouble the Water” is a powerfully moving firsthand account of what it was like to experience the tragedy of Katrina.
Dec 1, 2008
St. John Health System recently opened a new 224-million-dollar facility, Providence Park Hospital, in Novi, Michigan, a wealthy suburb of Detroit. The new hospital comes complete with private rooms with flat-screen televisions and large windows for viewing what the hospital refers to as its “green space.”
This is the same hospital system that last year shut down Riverview Hospital, located in a poor area of Detroit. Riverview was the third hospital St. John’s has closed in Detroit in the last 10 years, all the while opening or refurbishing hospitals in wealthy suburbs.
St. John’s is Detroit’s local affiliate of Ascension Health, the country’s largest non-profit health system, owned by the Roman Catholic Church. Non-profit health systems are exempt from taxes–in exchange, so the law says, they provide benefits to the community.
In Detroit, where St. John’s has now closed its last hospital, there are nearly a quarter of a million people without any kind of health care coverage, and with no public or non-profit hospitals left.
St. John’s dares to say that its mission is to care for the poor–so long as they live in a wealthy suburb, that is!
Dec 1, 2008
On November 25, the federal government issued new rules allowing states to charge premiums and co-payments for poor people on Medicaid and to deny them medical care if they don’t pay. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that as a result 13 million people will face co-pays. The HIV Medicare and Medicaid Working Group pointed out, “It is well documented that even nominal levels of cost sharing result in people without medically necessary care.” The Administration understands this full well, since it says it expects the federal and state governments to save double what the Medicaid recipients pay in, since so many people will be denied medical care.
In a time of deepening crisis, when millions more people will become eligible for Medicaid as they’re thrust out of work and into poverty, the government is preparing to deny them medical care. A bureaucratic stroke of the pen will condemn part of the unemployed to death!
Dec 1, 2008
Diane Bukowski, a reporter for the Michigan Citizen in Detroit, was arrested while covering a fatal police chase.
The deaths occurred late on November 4 on Detroit’s northeast side, after Michigan state troopers chased a motorcyclist. Bukowski’s Citizen story quoted witnesses who saw the trooper hit the cyclist, who then plowed into a pedestrian. Both were killed.
Bukowski arrived two hours after the deaths occurred, showed her press ID, and was in the middle of taking photographs of the scene when she was arrested. A trooper swore at her, took her camera and erased her photos.
Bukowski was originally arrested on a misdemeanor of interfering with a police officer. But she has built a reputation for exposing police brutality. Several days later, Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy charged her with five felonies of assaulting, resisting, and obstructing a police officer. These five felonies carry a total possible sentence of twenty years!
The State Police deny hitting the motorcyclist, and say Bukowski was arrested because she “crossed a line.”
Which line was that–exposing the truth of the cops’ reckless disregard for people’s lives?!
Bukowski says she’s establishing a legal defense fund. Anyone interested in helping can contact her at 313-205-6718.
Dec 1, 2008
Auto executives are threatening if they don’t get government money, their companies could collapse, endangering the whole economy, costing millions of jobs.
It’s true, much of the economy rests on auto–perhaps one in ten jobs in the whole country depend directly or indirectly on auto.
But handing over billions of dollars to auto executives won’t save jobs in the auto industry, nor in the economy as a whole.
Congress, with the Democrats in the lead, promises to help the auto companies–but ONLY if the companies “restructure.”
“Restructuring” auto won’t save jobs either. It will cost them. For decades auto has done nothing but restructure–and all that did was cost hundreds of thousands of jobs and reduce the standard of living of auto workers, and with them, that of the whole working class.
With every “restructuring,” the auto companies took out more profit, using it to enrich executives and to hand out dividends on top of dividends to wealthy investors, who gambled that money away in the Wall Street casinos. The auto companies themselves diverted profits made in production into their own financial subsidiaries–which used them to bundle up mortgages and sell them as securities.
Almost every big production industry was run like that–until this whole financial house of cards collapsed.
And yet, these brazen con artists dare to come back demanding that auto workers give up still more concessions in order to “save the auto industry.”
No–workers have no reason to give up anything. Down that road lies disaster.